“She disappeared in 1940. In the spring.” “So Benjamin is building his chalet up to that time, then gives up and rents it out instead.” “And Hoskuldur is one of the tenants.” “Have you found out anything else about this Hoskuldur character?”
“No, not yet. Shouldn’t we start with him?” Sigurdur Oli asked, hoping to escape from the cellar.
“I’ll check him out,” Erlendur said, and to Sigurdur Oli’s chagrin added: “See if you can find anything more about him or anyone else in all that rubbish. If there’s one note, there may well be more.”
14
Erlendur sat by Eva Lind’s bedside for quite a while after arriving from the embassy, and he turned over in his mind what to talk about. He had no idea what to say to her. He made several attempts, in vain. Ever since the doctor mentioned that it would help if he talked to her, he had repeatedly wondered what to say, but never reached any conclusion.
He began talking about the weather, but soon gave that up. Then he described Sigurdur Oli and told her how tired he had been looking recently. But there was not much else to say about him. He tried to find something to say about Elinborg, but gave up on that too. Then he told her about Benjamin Knudsen’s fiancee, who was supposed to have drowned herself, and about the love letters he found in the merchant’s cellar.
He told Eva Lind he had seen her mother sitting at her bedside.
Then he fell silent.
“What’s with you and Mum?” Eva Lind had once asked when she was visiting him. “Why don’t you talk?”
Sindri Snaer had come with her, but did not stay long, leaving the two of them together as darkness fell. It was December and there were Christmas songs on the radio, which Erlendur switched off and Eva Lind turned back on, saying she wanted to listen to them. She was several months pregnant and had gone straight for the time being, and as usual when she sat down with him she began to talk about the family she did not have. Sindri Snaer never talked about that, nor about his mother or sister or all that never happened. He was silent and withdrawn when Erlendur spoke to him. Didn’t care for his father. That was the difference between the sister and brother. Eva Lind wanted to get to know her father and did not baulk at holding him responsible.
“Your mother?” Erlendur said. “Can’t we turn off those Christmas jingles?”
He was trying to win time. Eva’s probing into the past always threw him into a quandary. He didn’t know the answers to give about their short-lived marriage, the children they had, why he had walked out. He didn’t have answers to all her questions, and sometimes that enraged her. She had a short fuse as far as her family was concerned.
“No, I want to hear Christmas songs,” Eva Lind said, and Bing Crosby went on dreaming of a white Christmas. “I’ve never ever heard her say a good thing about you, but she must have seen something in you all the same. At first. When you met. What was it?”
“Have you asked her?”
“Yes.”
“And what did she say?”
“Nothing. That would mean she’d have to say something positive about you and she can’t handle that. Can’t handle the idea of there being anything good about you. What was it? Why the two of you?”
“I don’t know,” Erlendur said, and meant it. He tried to be honest. “We met at a dance. I don’t know. It wasn’t planned. It just happened.”
“What was going on in your head?”
Erlendur did not reply. He thought about children who never knew their parents; never found out who they really were. Entered their life when it was as much as halfway through and did not have a clue about them. Never got to know them except as father and mother and authority and protector. Never discovered their shared and separate secrets, with the result that the parents were just as much strangers as everyone else the children met during the course of their lives. He pondered how parents managed to keep their children at arm’s length until all that remained was acquired, polite behaviour, with an artificial sincerity that sprang from common experience rather than real love.
“What was going on in your head?” Eva Lind’s questions opened wounds that she picked at constantly.
“I don’t know,” Erlendur said, keeping her at a distance as he had always done. She felt that. Maybe she acted in this way to produce such a reaction. Gain one more confirmation. Feel how remote he was from her and how far away she was from understanding him.
“You must have seen something in her.”
How could she understand when he sometimes did not understand himself?
“We met at a dance,” he repeated. “I don’t expect there was any future in that.”
“And then you just left.”
“I didn’t just leave,” Erlendur said. “It wasn’t like that. But in the end I did leave and it was over. We didn’t do it… I don’t know. Maybe there is no right way. If there is, we didn’t find it.”
“But it wasn’t over,” Eva Lind said.
“No,” Erlendur said. He listened to Bing Crosby on the radio. Through the window he watched the big snowflakes drifting to earth. Looked at his daughter. The rings pierced through her eyebrows. The metal stud in her nose. Her army boots up on the coffee table. The dirt under her fingernails. The bare stomach that showed beneath her black T-shirt and was beginning to bulge.
“It’s never over,” he said.
Hoskuldur Thorarinsson lived in a flat in the basement of his daughter’s elegant detached house in Arbaer and gave the impression of being pleased with his lot. He was a small, nimble man with silvery hair and a silver beard around his little mouth, wearing a checked labourer’s shirt and beige corduroys. Elinborg tracked him down. There weren’t many people in the national registry named Hoskuldur and past retirement age. She telephoned most of them, wherever they lived in Iceland, and this particular Hoskuldur from Arbaer told her, you bet he rented from Benjamin Knudsen, that poor, dear old chap. He remembered it well although he did not spend long in the chalet on the hill.
They sat in his living room, Erlendur and Elinborg, and he had made coffee and they talked about this and that. He told them he was born and bred in Reykjavik, then started complaining how those bloody conservatives were throttling the life out of pensioners as if they were a bunch of layabouts who couldn’t provide for themselves. Erlendur decided to cut the old man’s ramblings short.
“Why did you move out to the hill? Wasn’t it rather rural for someone from Reykjavik?”
“You bet it was,” Hoskuldur said as he poured coffee into their cups. “But there was no alternative. Not for me. You couldn’t find housing anywhere in Reykjavik at that time. People crammed into the tiniest rooms during the war. All of a sudden all the yokels could come to town and earn hard cash instead of getting paid with a bowl of curds and a bottle of booze. Slept in tents if they had to. The price of housing went sky high and I moved out to the hill. What are those bones you found there?”
“When did you move to the hill?” Elinborg asked.
“It would have been some time around 1943, I reckon. Or ’44. I think it was autumn. In the middle of the war.”
“How long did you live there?”
“I was there for a year. Until the following autumn.”
“Did you live alone?”
“With my wife. Dear old Elly. She’s passed away now.”
“When did she die?”
“Three years ago. Did you think I buried her up on the hill? Do I look like the type, dearie?”
“We can’t find the records of anyone who lived in that house,” Elinborg said without answering his remark. “Neither you nor anyone else. You didn’t register as domiciled there.”